memory--I recalled the piteous uncertainty of movement in the blind; the
dread hesitancy of the advancing foot, unless the afflicted one was on
very familiar ground. I tried walking in the dark, tried walking with
closed eyes. It was surprising how quickly my fears gathered about my
feet. Instinctively I put out one hand now and then, but the fear of
bumping into something was as nothing to the fear of stepping off or
down, or falling through the darkness--oh!

Then I resolved to play _Bertha_ with open eyes. It was much the more
difficult way, but I was well used to taking infinite pains over small
matters, and believing that the open, unseeing eye was far more pathetic
than the closed eye, I proceeded to work out my idea of how to produce
the unseeing look. By careful experiment I found that if the eyes were
very calm in expression, very slow in movement, and at all times were
raised slightly above the proper point of vision, the effect was really
that of blindness.

It was unspeakably fatiguing to keep looking just above people's heads,
instead of into their faces, as was my habit, but where is the true actor
or actress who stops to count the cost in pain or in inconvenience when
striving to build up a character that the public may recognize? Says the
ancient cook-book: "First catch your hare, and then--"; so with the
actor, first catch your idea, your desired effect, and _then_ reproduce
it (if you can). But in the case of blind _Bertha_ I must have reproduced
with some success the effect I had been studying, for an old newspaper
clipping beside me says that: "The doubting, hesitating advance of her
foot, the timid uncertainty of her occasional investigating hand spelled
blindness as clearly as did her patient unseeing eyes," and for my reward
that wretched man amused himself by pulling faces at me and trying to
break me down in my singing of "Auld Robin Grey," until I was obliged to
sing with my eyes tight shut to save myself from laughter; and when the
curtain had fallen he said to me: "I'll settle your hash for you some
night, young woman, you see if I don't--you just wait now!" And the next
season, in Cincinnati, in very truth, he did "settle my hash" for me, to
his great delight and my vexation.

He was so very, very funny as _Major Wellington de Boots_ in "Everybody's
Friend"; his immense self-satisfaction, his stiff little strut, his
martial ardor, his wild-eyed cowardice were trying enough, but when he
d